Perhaps it’s simply a numbers game

I’ve sat through a fair few presentations and lectures about the awesome power of digital campaigning, from visitors from Argentina fighting for the forest law, to professional marketers from the Obama campaign.

Too many times have I had to listen to ridiculous numbers of people taking that small click, to wonder if perhaps the right number of people wield the mouse, one more time, then change will come?

So I took to considering some numbers....

The UK has a population of around 61 million, the electoral reform reckon there are 45 odd million people eligible to vote, and voter turnout runs at about 65% so there are maybe 30 million people out there willing to do a little something. Well at least vote for someone else to do something, which is a start.

Then at the other end of the spectrum, in the UK the activist movements of Climate Camp, Friends of the Earth, Amnesty, Greenpeace, CND and People & Planet, mixed with the volunteer networks of RSPB, Action Aid, Oxfam, Christian Aid and the like, together probably involve no more than 10-15,000 active people. Hardly a force for democratic change?

And yet The Wave last year mobilised perhaps 50,000 people, the big Stop the War March plausibly brought 1 million +  people together, and so those 10-15,000 activists do have the power to mobilise many more people. Clearly there is a wider ‘movement’ out there that is bigger than those organisational networks, but well connected to them. Maybe the churches fit in here somewhere?

But where do the online numbers come in?

The latest email action on the 38 degrees site has 30,000 odd signatures’, the Amnesty UK facebook page has a similar number of fans (quite how useful they are is another matter), the Greenpeace Airplot campaign attracted 91,000 sign ups and the email lists behind these numbers I reckon (as an informed guess) float around the 100-200,000 mark. With a click though rate of about 25% - that's what maybe 30-40,000 online active people per organisation, of a wider UK online active community of 200,000?

So where’s the big deal, these numbers are not incomparable to the numbers of people who mobilise offline, and yet this lighter, easier, less consequential form of activism seems all the rage. It’s the future but is it any different? or any good?

However I have figures to suggest that sometimes, when things go viral then the numbers get very big indeed. The Greenpeace Nestle campaign leaps to mind, attracting 1.5 million views to the viral advert generating 200,000 emails.

But a note of caution: There's a difficulty here, separating the numbers about what happens in the UK, from what happens globally. These numbers sound big for our tiny island, but there’s a big global online community out there, and increasing numbers of them are very internet savvy.

So on a more local level if an ingenious (and very successful) piece of digital campaigning in the UK achieves 2 million hits to ones Flickr site, and 25,000 participations how many active people are behind those numbers.

But still how many are ‘online active’ in the UK? Of more note, how many are the same people that are active offline, goofing off work, in a time/place where they cannot be out campaigning with their local Amnesty group, or marching against the war. Are we in fact talking about the same people?

Finally of the 61 million people in the UK, how many give a toss to do even the little something that is to click on a send button. If this is so few then is it really about numbers at all, but more of the depth and detail of the action one does.

If the later we should simply be doing more with the people who have already embraced activism, rather than dumbing down actions to get those list numbers up.